


New Words

by 23Murasaki



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Cute Kids, Dalish, First Meetings, Gen, Gratuitous Elvish, Language Geekery, Nonsense, Qunari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 06:54:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3886558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little Ashe Adaar likes learning new words from the travelers coming through her town. She pesters some Dalish elves and makes a new friend.<br/>... It's cute little kid nonsense with two potential Inquisitors, okay? I have no excuse whatsoever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Words

"It’s good to know languages, I think,” Ashe chirps in a pitch-perfect Orlesian accent before she switches back to sounding like a Marcher. “I like understanding people.” The Orlesian accent always makes travelers smile, even the Orlesian ones, and once they’re smiling they’re not looking at her grey skin or sharp horns anymore. These travelers are smiling– smiling despite themselves, that’s an idiom that Tama doesn’t like – and it makes the patterns drawn on their faces move and change.  
  
“And you bother everyone who comes through this town, hm?” asks one of the travellers, who has red hair done up in intricate braids. “Fenedhis.”  
  
“That’s a bad word,” said Ash solemnly. Tama taught her to know bad words where she heard them, after all, because it was important to know what people said about you even if you didn’t understand all the pieces. The other traveler, the dark haired one, laughed aloud.  
  
“She has you there, lethallin,” she said, while the redhead scoffed and shook his head. “Well, what would you like to know? Not bad words, I hope.”  
  
“Not bad words,” Ashe agrees. “What does ‘lethallin’ mean?” It is a word that rolls around on her tongue, like a liquid. Tama says that speaking Common is like spitting pebbles and Rivaini is like rolling your tongue, while Qunlat is a song in your teeth. Ashe’s mouth has to move in new ways to say lethallin.  
  
“Something like a cousin,” says the traveller. “Someone you are close to.” She doesn’t have cousins, because Tama came to town alone with a baby, but she has a dozen human aunties who are grateful to Tama and some of them have children.  
  
“Does it have to be a blood-family-member?” she asks, and the traveler shakes her head.  
  
“Family isn’t always blood, da’len,” she says gently. “Come, I’ll teach you some more.”  
  
————-  
  
The travelers are elvhen. They say it with a vh far down in their throats and grumble when the humans can’t say it the same way. Ashe can say it like them, but that’s because at the age of eight she speaks three languages already and Qunlat makes that noise sometimes. She’s quick to learn words and phrases, and she can make everyone who talks to her smile. That’s good enough. She’s ushered from their camp before suppertime, because no one wants to explain to Tama why she’s missing supper, not even the toughest elvhen hunter, and that means she doesn’t have the chance to talk to the girl who is making flowers grow around her feet. It’s a pity. Tama doesn’t like magic, but making things grow is a good sort of magic, a gentle sort of magic, and Ashe knows that that girl is no dangerous thing.  
  
————  
  
Tama doesn't believe in fate, because it isn't in the Qun. Ashe is too little to understand whether or not she ought to believe in the Qun or in Andraste or in the Sky Lady or in Mythal and Elgar’nan, but meeting the flower girl again feels like it should mean something. Ashe finds her lost, crying, and cornered by a bear, but the bear is young and Ashe is imposing when she puts fire on her hands and on her horns and lowers her head and charges, so the bear goes away. The flower girl keeps crying, so Ashe douses her flames on the hem of her shirt and reaches over gently.  
  
“Da’len,” she says softly, trying to make the word the right kind of sing-song. It means child, and while she’s not sure how much younger the flower girl is, she barely comes up to Ashe’s shoulder and her face is baby-round. “Da’len, you are safe. Ar lasa mala eth.” The flower girl wraps her arms around Ashe’s waist and clings, while daisies and buttercups sprout up around her bare feet. Finally big, bright blue eyes look up into Ashe’s face, and the the flower girl hiccups but stops crying.  
  
“Ma serannas,” she says shakily. That means thank you, and there are any number of things one is supposed to say in response to thank you, but Ashe’s mind goes unexpectedly blank.  
  
“Did you know buttercups are poisonous?” she blurts out instead, and wide blue eyes get even wider.  
  
“No! Is that why Keeper won’t let me use them for tea?”  
  
(Years later, there would be jokes made about a vashoth, an inquisitor, and offering dignitaries buttercup tea, and the story in some form would wind its way through the Free Marches to Tama’s ears, and she would throw up her hands in fondness and despair.)


End file.
